In online advertising, advertisers bid to have online advertisements displayed in online information and pay for these advertisements based on the number of times each advertisement is accessed. For example, an advertiser bids to have a web-based advertisement for a good or service displayed in a web page. Using a pay-per-click model, advertisers pay an advertising platform service when the online advertisement is accessed.
The problem with this business model is that an aggregator can get paid for each and every user action that results in a click to an advertisement the aggregator originates. An aggregator is an entity that aggregates online content and referring links. The aggregator has an incentive to get a user to click on multiple displayed advertisements, irrespective of their utility to the user. This incentive is in conflict to the interests of the users, who wish to maximize utility for each click, and advertisers who have advertisements displayed on an aggregator's site, who wish to maximize user attention on their site (and thus have the incentive to maximize utility for the user). This model also encourages aggregators to pay more than an otherwise equilibrium price for traffic interested in a specific topic. By paying a higher price for advertisements, the advertisement aggregator acts directly against the interests of those competing for that traffic, and ultimately indirectly against the interests of the advertising platform itself, which will suffer by having advertisements for pages of lower utility ranked higher than advertisements for pages of higher utility in their search results.